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ABSTRACTThe increasing use of incentive pay schemes in recent years has raised concerns about their potential detrimental effect on intrinsic job satisfaction (JS), job security and employee morale. This study explores the impact of pay incentives on the overall JS of workers in the United Kingdom and their satisfaction with various facets of jobs. Using data from eight waves (1998–2005) of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and a uniquely designed well‐being dataset (EPICURUS), a significant positive impact on JS is only found for those receiving fixed‐period bonuses. These conclusions are robust to unobserved heterogeneity, and are shown to depend on a number of job‐quality characteristics that have not been controlled for in previous studies.

This article examines the tenure‐earnings profiles and suggests that the more training is provided to the individual by the employer, the steeper is the tenure profile of earnings. The provision of training by the employer is modelled as endogenous and subject to choice decisions using an ordered probit model corresponding to three levels of training. The earnings equations of three groups of employees are then adjusted for potential effects of bias due to selectivity by using Lee's procedure, and heterogeneity bias using the Altonji and Shakotko instrumental variable procedure.

AbstractEconomic theory suggests that workers' pay is mainly determined by their marginal product and that industry wage differentials may result either from the structure of the industry (demand type factors) or human capital characteristics of the employed labour force (supply type factors). This study uses a major data set from the US that allows the investigation of the effects of these demand and supply type factors on average earnings across industries. Importantly, this paper shows that aggregate demand relevant to the particular industry has a strong positive effect on the industry's average earnings in addition to the previously established results regarding the significance of the effects of worker and firm characteristics. Consequently, labour market policies crafted without due consideration of macroeconomic demand may be ineffective as a solution to the proliferation of low pay employment.

This paper reviews important aspects of gender labour market inequalities in four European Union countries. It shows that individual countries differ in many aspects of gender discrimination. It seems that contributing factors to these differences are the national social and economic structures, the level of economic development, the legislative framework and the effectiveness of anti-discriminatory policies. It also shows that there are notable improvements in many gender gap indicators during the recent years and, at least part of the improvement should be attributed to the European commission's legislative and policy initiatives.